Informing the Student Citizen

Government Documents at Adams Library

By Rachel H. Carpenter

Reference Librarian and Coordinator of Government Documents
James P. Adams Library, Rhode Island College

The United States Government produces a staggering amount of information
in an impressive array of formats - in print and digitally, single pages and
bound volumes, microfiche, CD-rom, DVD, interactive databases and internet
web sites. Its publications include everything from blank forms to over 200
years of Congressional debate, hearings, and legislation; from posters and
consumer brochures to interactive databases of demographic and economic
statistics; from the U.S. Quarterly Hogs and Pigs Inventory (http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Hogs_and_Pigs/qtr_e.asp)
to the 10 MB searchable and downloadable Budget of the United States
Government (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/). Government
information is public information, paid for by tax dollars, and often
mandated by law. Much, but far from all of this information is made
available to citizens - in the present age, much of it via the Internet and
the World Wide Web. Since 1813, publicly accessible libraries have had a
role in the dissemination, maintenance and preservation of government
information for the purpose of making it readily available to the American
public.1.

It is a commonly and widely held ideal that U.S. citizens have, or should
have, the right to know the business of their government - because it is
their business. And, it has been argued that the system of checks and
balances embedded in the Constitution and the rights of citizens set forth
in the Bill of Rights have served ultimately to underscore the idea that the
people have a "right to know." 2. But "the melancholy fact" as Professor Joe
Morehead writes in the Introduction to United States Government
Information (6th) "is that nothing inheres in the Constitution or
statutes granting the right to be informed" 3.

James Madison, the 4th American president and the author of much of the
text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, has been
hailed as a champion of the public's "right to know," stemming in part from
the following oft quoted lines from his 1822 letter to W.T. Barry:

"A popular Government without popular information or the
means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be
their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge
gives." 4.

Interestingly, John Spence Walters claims in his book, U.S. Government
Publication. Ideological Development and Institutional Politics from the
Founding to 1970, that Madison actually rejected the idea of citizen
participation in the democratic process, beyond voting, because "informing
the public was inextricably linked to political accountability" ... and "...an
uninformed public fostered the detachment and disinterestedness with which
he [Madison] expected elected officials to conduct public business." 5.

Madison's axiom should, of course, be read and considered in the full
context of his letter to Barry, and of his overall political philosophy; yet
standing alone, it imparts great wisdom and advice. The necessity and
responsibility of citizens to be informed regarding matters of government is
fundamental to the success of a democracy.

As a participating institution in the American Democracy
Project, Rhode Island College encourages its students to be more
involved in the communities around them, and to be active participants in
our democracy. An important goal of the American Democracy Project
is "to produce graduates who understand and are committed to engaging in
meaningful actions as citizens in a democracy." (http://www.aascu.org/programs/adp/) Being more involved
requires being better informed. The process towards increasing civic
engagement will be well served by students being aware of and utilizing the
wealth of information resources produced by our government.

In this essay I hope to advocate for a wider familiarity and use of
government information resources in general, but particularly for students -
as students and as citizens. I will include a brief history of the role of
the Government Printing Office and its Federal Depository Library Program;
an overview of the federal documents collection of the James P. Adams
Library and offer suggestions for encouraging students to use these
important public resources.

The Government Printing Office and the Federal Depository Library Program

Since 1861, the Government Printing Office (GPO) has had the
responsibility of being the central agency through which the printing,
managing and distribution of government publications takes place. Managing
the publishing needs of government has never been an easy task, for a number
of reasons; significant among them, the sheer quantity of materials to be
printed and the lack of cooperation the GPO has often received from other
government agencies and departments. In the 20th century, the burgeoning
size of the executive branch and the increasing influence and power of some
executive departments eroded GPO's role as the central clearinghouse and
printer of public information. Departments and agencies circumvented the GPO
by setting up their own printing facilities or contracting with commercial
facilities and establishing their own mechanisms for disseminating (or not)
their publications. This bypassing of GPO resulted in thousands of
essentially unknown government publications which have had little or no
bibliographic control, preservation, or public availability.6. The
development of desktop and web publishing software in the last decade has
continued to exacerbate this problem.7.

In addition to printing activity, the GPO houses the Office of the
Superintendent of Documents, which oversees bibliographic control and
distribution of government documents. Bibliographic control is the
cataloging and indexing of publications to provide standardized description
and organization to aid in discovery and retrieval. GPO catalogs all formats
of government information including electronic formats such as CD-ROMs and
DVDs, online or digital publications - both PDF and hypertext- databases,
web pages and web sites. Cataloging of online documents is particularly
important considering the elusive and often non-permanent nature of such
documents. Information resources which are "born digital" (i.e. begin as an
online or web resource) and have no print counterpart, are ephemeral in
every sense of the word. These documents get posted and then "taken down;"
moved, replaced or buried under layers of web pages and links, and even
completely disappear. Like the print publications mentioned earlier that do
not travel the route through the GPO, these documents often will not be
cataloged or indexed in any of the standard finding aids. They are not
distributed to federal depository libraries and they are not sold at GPO
book stores. There may be no effort to authenticate or preserve these
documents. It is impossible to know how many of these "fugitive documents"
have come and gone, but the problem of "fugitive documents" is pervasive,
and has been throughout the 20th century.

The GPO has been working towards a resolution to the problems of
bibliographic control and "fugitive documents" and has recently contracted
with the Harris Corporation to develop an integrated system for managing
official government content "which will verify and track versions [of
documents], assure authenticity, preserve content and provide permanent
access." 8. This system will also become the basis for the development of a
national bibliography of government information resources.

The ubiquitous nature of the internet and the World Wide Web, has in
ways, been a real boost to public access to state and federal information;
however, the preservation, authentication, and the stability of online
documents are very big concerns of librarians and scholars and of the GPO.
It is not acceptable for original documents to come and go without a trace.
It is not acceptable for primary-resource materials to be digitized and
widely disseminated without a mechanism guaranteeing their content as
original and official. It is not acceptable for public documents to be born
digital and not be converted to some kind of permanent copy to be preserved
as part of a national archive. All of this has been occurring. The GPO, in
spite of a serious and steady lack of resources, has managed to stay focused
on these concerns and to adapt practices to the changing technology. It is
important to remember we still have over 200 years of government information
and documents that are not digital and that we must continue to use,
preserve, and ultimately convert to the current technology of today or
whatever it will be when the time and resources are available.

The Depository Collections at the James P. Adams Library of Rhode Island College

The dissemination and distribution of government documents through
libraries fall within the scope of the GPO's Federal Depository Library
Program (FDLP), the roots of which travel deep into the early years of the
19th Century. The FDLP currently distributes documents to over 1250
designated federal depository libraries (FDLs). The James P. Adams Library
at Rhode Island College is one of 12 in the state of Rhode Island. The
others are Brown University, Providence College, the University of Rhode
Island, Roger Williams University, the Naval War College, the Rhode Island
State House Library, the Rhode Island State Law Library, Providence Public
Library, Newport Public Library, Warwick Public Library, and the Westerly
Public Library.

The obvious advantage to being a depository library is the documents
themselves since a depository library receives them for free. "Free" of
course, is a relative term, because one cannot ignore the resources
depository libraries use in developing, housing, maintaining and generally
providing expertise and access, as well as providing equipment and hardware
to view and copy materials.

Every FDL is required to provide full, open access to its public document
collections. In RI, all academic institutions, with the exception of Brown
University and the Naval War College, are open to the general public as a
matter of standard policy. At Brown, an individual must inform staff at the
entrance to the library that they are in need of federal or state documents.
The Naval War College library doesn't actually restrict access, yet by
virtue of their location at a military facility where security is a concern,
on site visitation to the facility can be difficult. In such circumstances
and for documents otherwise not locally available, interlibrary loan
services are used.

Adams Library has been a federal depository library since 1965. Our
collection includes classes and categories of government materials that meet
the curricular needs of our students as well as the interests of the general
public. Our collection is strongest in Education Department materials and
those of Health & Human Services and the Department of Commerce. URI
collects much more from the Department of Agriculture - nearly 90% - than
any other RI depository. The U.S. Naval War College collects 13% of the
total GPO output, but selects 43% of the Defense Department publications
compared to RIC's 2%. 9. The depository collections in RI represent more
than 90 percent of all of the publications issued by the GPO through the
FDLP.

Adams library collects 28% of the current offerings of the GPO. The bulk
of our existing collection is in print, since we have retained many of the
documents we have acquired over our 40 years in the program. We continue to
receive documents in microfiche, though this format is diminishing. CD and
DVD formats are collected as well. As would be expected, much of what is
available is also in digital or online formats. Currently 92% of all that is
offered by the GPO is available digitally. The remaining 8 percent are
materials that are, at this time, too problematic to be generated in an
online format. 10.

In 2002, the Government Publications Librarian at Adams Library retired.
In the same year we hired a new director who felt that some organizational
changes involving Government Documents would improve services and the use of
resources. It was decided that the Government Documents Department would
become a service area of the Reference Department. I took on the role of
coordinator of the depository collection though all Reference librarians
assist library users with government information resources. The decision was
also made at this time to integrate the depository collection at Adams into
the main library collection.

Integration will mean that, rather than having a separate collection of
government documents arranged by its own Superintendent of Documents (Su
Doc) Classification System, these documents will be classed in the Library
of Congress Classification system and interfiled with the library's main
collection. The benefit of integrating the government documents collection
into the main collection is that it brings together most of the resources a
library holds on a subject into the same physical location. This improves
visibility and access while browsing. The drawbacks for integration lie
primarily in the logistics of changing what is already in place. All items
in the collection will need to be reclassed, relabeled, physically moved and
interfiled - a huge undertaking. Though items get weeded as part of regular
collection management, the collection has not been systematically weeded
since it began. Before beginning integration of this collection, it will
need to be thoroughly weeded.

It is important to include at this time a mention of state publications
and information. Like the federal government, state governments are also
gatherers, producers and distributors of information. In many states, the
agency that coordinates the dissemination of government documents and
information is the state library. In Rhode Island, which does not have a
state library, the State House Library is responsible for this activity. The
State House Library houses the RI State Publications Clearinghouse, which
operates similarly to the Superintendent of Documents office within the GPO.
The purpose and operation of the State Clearinghouse mimics the federal
system, including, unfortunately, the problems of limited budget and
staffing resources and the lack of cooperation from other state agencies.
Nearly all of RI's academic libraries and most public libraries are
depositories for state government documents.

The Use of Government information by Students

Government documents are largely, but not solely, primary source
materials, i.e. a first hand accounting of an event or the originating point
of data or information. It is this primary data that is used to write our
histories and social analyses and to develop government policies, programs
and services which support the nation's social, economic, cultural and
political life. The primary-source nature of these documents is one of the
things that make them valuable for the researcher, including the student
researcher. A common request at our Reference Desk is: "What is [or] where
can I get primary sources for my topic or paper?" Government publications
can, in many cases, meet this need for primary materials. Our collection
includes standard and widely used primary documents like the Congressional
Record which we have in print back to 1937 and which is also electronic from
1994 to the present. (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/index.html). The
World Wide Web has allowed for easy access to materials and resources that
have until recently only been available at a single physical location like
the National Archives or the Library of Congress. A marvelous example is the
Library of Congress' American Memory website which (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html) offers visual
and audio access to a wealth of materials from the Library's collections.
Included are such resources as the Work Progress Administration's California
Folk Music Project and its 35 hours of musical recordings of different
ethnic groups found in Northern California in the 1930s. (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html). The
American Factfinder site of the Census Bureau (http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en)
is an interactive database of detailed U.S. population statistics that can
be telescoped to the zip code or even narrower census tract levels. The
National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services
sites include many original research studies and data sources on current
public health concerns such as stem cell research, flu vaccines, e- coli,
etc. These are but a very few examples of the types of primary materials
available from the government and accessible at or via depository library
collections.

We have not conducted use studies on the government documents collection
at Adams Library. The limited circulation and in-house use figures we have
do not indicate whether the circulation of materials is by student, staff,
faculty or other status of user, therefore, our knowledge regarding the use
of this collection is mostly anecdotal. Our collection is cataloged, so
these materials are discovered through the HELIN catalog. We know that the
collection is used, mostly by students but also by faculty and the general
public and by users throughout the HELIN network of libraries and through
interlibrary lending.

I have found that government documents can confound users. A student
might not be sure what genre of material a government publication is. Many
formats are ephemeral such as slip laws, brochures, posters, and
newsletters. Many documents come through as simply stapled pages or single
pages, or as "occasional" publications, technical reports, preprints, etc.
Are these books, monographs, articles? Are these "scholarly" materials or
are they even credible materials? Government documents found online often
invite the same questions. The websites, like their departments and
agencies, are vast in their content; multi faceted, multi layered,
non-standardized and often with many "moving parts," i.e. hypertext links,
interactive databases, oft revamped and redesigned pages, disappearing
documents, etc. Using them can be exciting and intensely frustrating. Citing
such resources can be very problematic since, too often, simply determining
an author or date or issuing agency is near impossible. From discovering
such resources to attempting to find them a day later, they defy conventions
and "defy gravity." I've encountered students who simply did not wish to
deal with these questions and, thus, these materials.

Yet, certain courses and programs offered at RIC call for
considerable use of government documents and data. Our library
instruction program schedules a number of classes most semesters that
include a significant focus on using government resources. Geography
101, Political Science 308 and History 200 all incorporate the use of
resources like census data, legislative and case law resources and
publications like the Congressional Record, Public Papers of the
Presidents and other primary public documents. Social Work undergraduate
and graduate classes are introduced to government resources, as are
upper level and graduate classes in Education. These students examine
legislation and legislative histories, hearings and reports in order to
analyze and/or evaluate public policies. Students taking Business,
Government and Society examine regulatory agencies and the rules and
regulations (found in the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal
Register) under which industries, agencies and businesses function.

Increasing Student Use of Government Information

As faculty, we would all acknowledge, I'm sure, that regardless of the
courses or programs with which we are involved, what we want to teach
students is knowledge, skills and philosophies that can be used in broader
life experiences. We hope that we are teaching thinking and decision-making
skills, research, writing and communication skills, and we hope that
students will use these skills in more than their jobs and professions. We
hope that they will use them as parents and neighbors, as volunteers and
consumers, as voters, - essentially, as citizens. Increasing student
knowledge of and encouraging the use of government information resources in
coursework hopefully will serve to increase lifelong use of these
resources.

As the library staff works to improve access to both print and online
government materials, we will increase our own knowledge and use of these
documents and advocate for these resources in more direct ways. Our work at
the Reference desk presents us with constant teachable moments- one-to-one
opportunities to explore with students their assignments, topics, and
information needs. I encourage students, more and more, to utilize
government documents and information, in addition to book and article
references. I do so because these materials cover a broad array of topics
and because they are widely available in our library, in the HELIN network
of libraries and in special depository collections throughout the state. I
do so because these are credible and useable materials and because they are
good sources for primary data. I do so because they are widely available on
the Internet. And I do so because they represent the workings of our federal
and state governments and thus, are significant resources to all of us as
citizens.

I urge all faculty to encourage and require students to use federal and
state data and publications, just as you might require them to use books and
journal articles. In doing so, please take the opportunity to inform
students that Adams Library is a depository for both federal and state
government documents.

If students are required to use primary source materials, suggest
government documents as resources which may suit their particular need.
Encourage students to speak to a Reference librarian for assistance with
these materials.

If assignments require statistics, remind students that many statistics
originate from government resources and studies. Require that students find
the data source rather than use statistics located in secondary sources and
websites. In most cases the source information should be referenced in the
secondary source. If a source is not obvious, a librarian will be able to
help. As always, recommend that they ask for assistance. Librarians will
help identify and locate an original document in hard copy or online.

If you schedule library instruction sessions and specifically want
government information mentioned or highlighted, please do not hesitate to
ask. And we will certainly recommend government resources if we feel they
will add real value for students.

Conclusion

My goal is to increase the use of government information resources by
student researchers and to make our depository collection dynamic-a visible,
accessible and useful resource for all library users. Developing the
collection through regular review of our selection profile and providing
quality bibliographic control of these resources, in all of their forms,
will improve visibility and access. Integrating this collection into the
library's main collection will place these resources together with other
library materials in a subject area, also making them more visible.
Emphasizing these resources in more library instruction sessions and in
individual reference interactions will underscore their usefulness.
Reminding and encouraging teaching faculty to advocate for government
information resources will also enhance familiarity and will add to the
credibility of these materials in student's eyes. Continuing to coordinate
with other depository libraries in RI to enrich holdings statewide will
enhance access to public information for all Rhode Islanders. Encouraging
and teaching students to become better informed, as well as more involved
citizens, will benefit them and the communities in which we all live and
work.